100 HOUSES
Selected Designs from Pencil Points – Pittsburgh Architectural Competition for A House for Cheerful Living
Kenneth Reid [foreword]
New York: Reinhold Publishng Corp., 1947. Original edition. Quarto. Library boards with binding tape and Publishers cover attached over lanced textblock. [vi] 114 pp. Floorplans and renderings printed on multiple paper stocks. An ex-University Library copy with minimal institutional markings early and late. Internally a very good copy of this rare volume.
7.75 x 11.25-inch softcover edition with 120 pages devoted to the “House for Cheerful Living” competition, sponsored by Pencil Points and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, 1945, juried by Pietro Belluschi, Ralph Flewelling, J. Byers Hays, Robert M. Little, Louis Skidmore, Philip Will, Jr., And Hugh A. Stubbins, Jr., Chairman.
Contents:
- First Prize: Norman Fletcher and Jean Bodman Fletcher.
- Second Prize: I. M. Pei and Frederick G. Roth.
- Third Prize: Ralph Rapson.
- Fourth Prize: Eduardo F. Catalano.
- Special Mentions: Karl J. Belser & Karel H. Dekker; Alexis Dukelski; Leon Hyzen & Almon Fordyce; Stanley A. Kazdailis; Oliver Lundquist; Charles G. Macdonald; Charles D. Wiley; and Elmer Babb.
- Mentions: Donald Barthelme; Thomas J. Biggs; Bernard L. Campbell; W. Brooks Cavin; C. N. Chau; A. Albert Cooling; Seymour R. Joseph; Vincent Kling; Pat Aloe Marshall; C. Stuart Perkins; I. M. Pei & Frederick G. Roth; Simon Schmiderer, Torquato De Felice & Michael M. Harris; E. W. Waugh, George Matsumoto & Charles T. Granger; and Frank Weiss.
- Special Prizes for Detail: Eduardo F. Catalano; W. Brooks Cavin; Louis C. Dixon & Lee B. Kline; Seymour Joseph; Charles G. Macdonald; I. M. Pei & Frederick G. Roth; Ralph Rapson; and Charles D. Wiley.
- Non-Premiated Designs: William Lake Addkison; Russell Amdal U. S. N. R.; John William Folsom; Alden B. Dow; George Farkas; Robert St. Owen Brown; Curtis Besinger; Katz-Waisman & Elmaleh; Anold Tucker & A. J. Donahue; De Witt C. Robinson; J. Milton Dyer, Joseph Ceruti & Maurice Cornell; Minoru Yamasaki; Stephen J. Alling; John Loring Perkins; E. W. Waugh, George Matsumoto & Charles T. Granger; Charles A. Pearson, Jr.; Percival Goodman; Antonin Raymond, Yusef Meer & Earl H. Strunk; Jedd Stow Reisner & George W. Mclaughlin; Lt. Cmdr. Samuel E. Homsey U. S. N. R.; Philip C. Johnson; Simon Breines; Gabriel F. Messena; Donald Hershey; Elliot L. Whitaker; Granger, Matsumoto & Waugh; Dwight Stevens; Charles H. Dornbusch & Wm. J. McArthur; Frederick H. Koch; Grevile Rickard; Leslie Arthur; Alfred Clauss & Jane West Clauss; Dixon & Kline [X3] ; Matern, Graff & York; Russel H. Hiett; George C. Andersen; John E. Furtune; Walter J. Theis; Richard H. Marr & Carl B. Marr; Oscar Stonorov & Louis I. Kahn; Marvin R. Dobberman; Edward St. Clair Pugh; Archibald Manning Brown; Benjamin H. Stein; T. Gerald Kronick; Alfred F. Simonson; L. Morgan Yost & Aubrey Tupper-White; John J. Fendya; John Hironimus; . Righton Swicegood; Raymond W. Garbe; R. W. Tempest; Clyde A. Stoody; Samuel Ladd; Lois & Fred Langhorst; E. H. & M. K. Hunter; Charles W. Lorenz; Louis C. Simmel, Jr. & Douglas Mcfarland; Burton Ashford Bugbee; Richard Haviland Smythe; Paul Haynes; Norman W. Alpaugh; Charles W. Beeston; Allan Mcdowell & George H. Van Anda; Phelphs Cunningham; and Marcel Breuer.
Jean Bodman Fletcher (1915–1965) was one of seven young founding members of The Architects Collaborative (TAC), the team-based practice established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Walter Gropius in 1945. Before her premature death in 1965 at the age of 50, Fletcher was partner-in-charge of several of the major projects that established TAC’s reputation in its first two decades. These included schools, housing developments, libraries, and medical facilities.
Jean and her husband Norman Fletcher soon gained recognition for a series of speculative designs and winning projects for national architectural competitions. In their first-prize entry for the design of “A House for Cheerful Living,” sponsored by Pencil Points and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in 1945, the couple proposed a single-story house for Salinas, California, with separate bedroom and living wings connected in an H-shaped plan by a prefabricated mechanical core. The competition jury commended the project’s straightforward character, remarking that “the design is sympathetically done; it is simple, direct, and has a definite American flavor that is refreshing.”
Commenting on it in the New York Times, the Fletchers declared: “We subscribe fully to the tendency in modern architecture of eliminating stylist ornaments in favor of practicality.”
The first issue of the legendary architecture journal Pencil Points appeared in 1920 as "a journal for the drafting room." Born out of The Architectural Review, and merged with Progressive Architecture in 1943, Pencil Points became the leading voice in architectural and graphic design when modernism flourished, introducing key players from America and Europe. It also established the agenda in architectural theory: multi volume pieces by John Harbeson, Talbot Hamlin, Hugh Ferriss, and others dealt with major issues that are still relevant today-architectural education and practice, small-house design and portable housing, city planning, and the influence (or not) of modernism. Items like George Nelson's series of reports from Europe in the early 1930s, H. Van Buren Magonigle's diatribes against modernism, and a glossary of Ecole des Beaux-Arts terms sit side-by-side with the best architectural drawings and photographs of the 20th century.